The Constant Gardener (published 2001) is of course one of the many Le Carré books which have been filmed. Didn’t catch the film myself, and the PVR fucked up when it was on TV recently.

Justin Quayle is in many ways a typical unlikely Le Carré hero. An unimportant man, as they say, a mid-level diplomat – not even a spy, not even pretending – who seems from the outside to be living a life of quiet, cuckolded, desperation as his much younger wife flirts at parties and gads about with her African lover.

Based in Nairobi, Quayle tends his garden and puts in his 9 to 5 at the British High Commission, ignored or sneered at by his colleagues – and particularly by his line manager Sandy Woodrow, a serial adulterer who has feelings for Quayle’s lovely wife Tessa and has asked her to elope with him.

Meanwhile Tessa pours her energy into aid work, supporting the women of Kenya as much as she can, and causing the occasional diplomatic embarrassment when her passions take her “too far”.

But then she turns up dead, with the African/Belgian doctor whom everybody assumes was her lover, in an out-of-the-way spot up country. Quayle is sequestered in Woodrow’s house to protect him from the press, and after the funeral is quietly ushered to the airport to take a leave of absence back in Blighty.

What’s brilliant about this is that Le Carré introduces us to Quayle (and his tragic marriage) as others see him. We see him through Woodrow’s eyes, and through Sandy’s wife Gloria’s eyes. We see part of the British police investigation, the behind the scenes manoeuvrings. Quayle is meek, mild, undemonstrative, unimpressive, living entirely within himself. Sandy himself seems more affected by Tessa’s horrible death, and we learn why, as he obsesses about her lovely face, her beautiful silhouette through her clothes against a backlit window.

One vignette tells us all we need to know about Tessa and the obsessive Woodrow. In hospital following the still-birth of her child, Sandy comes upon Tessa as she breastfeeds a sick Kenyan woman’s baby because the living baby’s mother is too sick to do so. That’s Tessa, putting her own grief aside to help a sister in need. Meanwhile, Sandy stands over her ogling her breasts and getting hot under the collar, convinced that her wanton display of boob means that she’s gagging for it.

And before you know it, you’re almost 200 pages into a 560-page novel, and then – at last – you start to learn something about the sidelined Justin Quayle’s inner self. It seems to be such a bold stroke, to withhold – and withhold – Justin’s point of view, for a third of the length of the book. And then you get it, not all at once, but slowly and painfully, you realise the strength of the marriage, of the love between Justin and Tessa. You learn how Gloria has fallen for Sandy, because she perceives his inner strength; how Tessa’s friend Ghita has fallen for Sandy, and how Tessa’s supposed lover was… well, spoiler alert.

So now Justin does what unlikely Le Carré heroes do. He stubbornly refuses to fit his stereotype, and manages to follow his wife’s footsteps as he investigates the causes of her death. We’re talking Big Pharma, big profits, and the endless exploitation of Africa by unscrupulous corporations. Le Carré adds in a note at the end that the truth is far, far worse than his fiction.

It’s not easy, and it’s not a slick operation, but Justin has some help along the way; still, ultimately he’s fighting the kind of implacable foe who will not be defeated. Le Carré is as angry as ever, but more gentle – in the way of Quayle – than he has been in other recent titles like Absolute Friends. The power of these corporations, the governments they’ve corrupted, the unlikeliness of any happy outcome – ever – makes for a profoundly depressing outlook, but the sheer poetry of Justin’s dogged determination – his constancy indeed – provide the possibility of something to be redeemed from this world.

This is not sentimental. We’re not meant to leave this with a warm feeling about the few good people there are in the world. We’re supposed to realise that some victories – even the most comprehensive triumphs of the powerful – are sick and hollow and that the closeted lives we lead as beneficiaries of developing world exploitation are part of the sickness.

Highly recommended.